


And Death Was on a Pale Horse

by AimeeLouWrites



Series: The Queen Mother AU [3]
Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Queen Mother (Hollow Knight), Angst, Embedded Images, Family Feels, Gen, QMAU Bad End AU, welcome to angst central
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 00:47:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21128030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AimeeLouWrites/pseuds/AimeeLouWrites
Summary: Mini fics for the Queen Mother AU (QMAU) of Hollow Knight wherein something goes very wrong and the Infection sweeps through Hallownest more or less the same as it did in the game.





	1. Sister

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Following up on a rumor about the fabled "Lost Princess" of Hallownest, Ghost discovers something both horrifying and wonderful.

Little Ghost limped into the final room, their carapace leaking void from the fight with the infected twin protectors. It was strange, actually, how the twins had borne such a strange resemblance to them. Void had leaked from their long, gangly limbs whenever Ghost had managed to land a blow—void and blighted light. And it was strange, too, how they had felt such foreign emotions during the fight. Bizarre images had simply appeared in their head, and sometimes it seemed as if the twins knew what they were going to do before they did. 

[ ](https://imgur.com/5ZnnzxF)

Another mystery that would remain unsolved, they supposed.

Ghost pushed past the overgrown foliage and into the edge of a small, inner clearing, where they stopped in surprise at the sight before them. They said the Lost Princess would be here, but there appeared to be a...tree? Leaking blighted light? No, those were eyes, though shut, that wept the putrid essence. And in the form of the tree, they could almost see the shape of a slim body, curved over the large basin at its foot that overflowed with infection. As they watched, another glowing tear fell with a goopy splash into the basin.

Ghost took a cautious step forward and a gentle, unnatural wind rustled through the leaves. With a voice like a sigh, the weeping figure spoke.

[ ](https://imgur.com/BJBBye7)

“Little brothers, have you come to sit with me again?” she said. “Her song grows….louder. It is nearly time.” When Ghost took another cautious step forward, she paused and inhaled sharply. “No. You are not them. But you are...similar. Kin. Oh…._ oh _ , little lost sibling. I have been waiting for you.” Her eyes slowly opened, revealing sickly, glowing orange. “Yes. The song _ is _ loud.” Her voice changed suddenly, startling Ghost as it shifted from a weak sigh to a strong, feminine timbre. 

“But I am not powerless yet.” Ghost watched in astonishment as the orange glow faded away, revealing void-black eyes.

Well. They supposed that they _ had _found the Lost Princess.

“Quickly, we haven’t much time,” she said urgently. “Come closer.” 

They took another step forward, then another, until they stood before the basin.

“You don’t know me, but I know you, _ Larula _. Tell me, have you met our foresighted brother?” An image appeared in their head of a tall, black-and-white figure robed in pale garments, one who bore a striking resemblance to the twins they had just killed. 

Was she doing that? they wondered in fearful astonishment. 

“You have never spoken with one of your siblings,” she said sadly. “Yes, I am showing you him, but it is nothing to be frightened of. We share a link, little sibling. I can hear you just as well as you can hear me.”

That was certainly new. Could she really hear them?

The Lost Princess laughed softly. “Oh, if we only had time, little sibling, I would spend days speaking with you. But we have no time. I can only hold Her at bay for so long, and with each moment Her rage grows. Our mother’s power will only last for so long.

Mother? they wondered.

“Mother,” she agreed softly, a black tear rolling down over the glowing tracks of infection that stained her face. The image of a tall, elegant white bug, crowned with the same branching horns as the Princess and swathed in glowing robes, appeared in their head. Ghost’s heart ached at the sight. 

“Mother gave her life for us, for _ me, _so that I might give you the tools you need to slay the Blighted One. Dearest little one, you must succeed where I failed. Break the basin, take the item within, and seek out Regulus. He will guide you where I could not. He will find you if you seek him.” Orange flickered in her Void eyes. “Take it and run,” she said urgently. Several more black tears rolled down her face as she blinked. “Do not return. There will be nothing left.”

_ But... _ they had just found her! They had just found a sibling, part of their family, and she wanted them to _ run? _

“_Run, _ ” she said sternly. “Nothing of me will remain once my hold breaks, little one. Promise me that you will _ run! _”

_ Alright, alright, they promised! _ Reluctantly, they took out their nail and slashed the basin apart, leaping back from the resulting flood of infection. A little black sphere, which had been at the bottom, floated toward them. They gingerly took ahold of it, avoiding the searing goo. The sphere, apparently made of void, dissolved in their hand, revealing half of a pure white charm.

“The Queensoul,” the Lost Princess said, her voice growing strained. “Our mother’s final gift. Find Regulus, little sibling.” Ghost looked up to see her eyes flutter closed. “Please, bury my brothers, if you can. And tell Regulus…” They stepped back several paces as mixed Void and blighted light dripped down her face. “Tell him...it’s not his fault….and that I love him.” She gasped in pain, a sound both mental and physical, and her gentle touch on their mind vanished.

They turned and ran.


	2. Brother

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ghost finds their older brother, the crazy Prince of Hallownest

Ghost wasn’t sure what they expected to find, once they were able to unseal and enter the strange dream totem that sat where the White Palace once had, but this...was not it. There was a truly bizarre amount of metal saws, which was one thing, but the fact that so many of them had been torn out of their housings and turned into welded...prototypes? Machines? Overly optimistic new weapons? That went beyond unexpected and straight into unnerving. 

Blueprints were scrawled haphazardly on the walls in dripping, multicolored lines, surrounded by technical jargon so thick that Ghost wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t a different language altogether. They assumed that each diagram explained the function of the mangled prototype before it, but whatever purposes those were they couldn’t even begin to guess.

As they continued cautiously through the halls, the wreckage only got stranger. Mangled corpses of void creatures lay scattered here and there, some on makeshift tables, some laid out in neat pieces on the floor with each detached limb labeled. Pale, silvery plants grew wild between floor tiles and the seams along the walls, casting thin shadows over the macabre displays below. They paused to stare at a dissected Kingsmould in disgust.

Was this their..._ father’s _ doing? They were beginning to think they didn’t want to find out.

Ghost came across a conspicuously untouched throne room, but all that was in there was a shell, shaped like the Pale King’s, sitting on a dusty throne. They paused, small hand pressed against the space just below the shell’s empty eyeholes, as a thought occurred to them. Was it _ his _ shell? Had he died here, surrounded by mangled corpses and failed prototypes? Had he died sealed away and alone?

They hurried on.

Finally, at the end of their long journey, they heard a sound. It was loud and discordant, the harsh shriek of metal tearing into metal. They followed it through increasingly dense debris, nail at the ready. A door—an actual door, not just an open archway— was propped open with a Kingsmould’s helmet. Ghost hedged past it nervously, eyeing the six-inch-thick slab of metal. What kind of things went on in this room that they needed a door so thick?

The answer was, apparently, explosions. Ghost stopped dead just inside the room, gaping at the carnage. Scorch marks mottled the walls in shades of black and rust-brown, layered over each other in an alarming array. Some of the resulting structural damage had been hastily patched over; some had not. Scraps of metal and containers full of…._ substance _ lay strewn about, next to dismembered Kingsmoulds and Wingsmoulds. More blueprints were scrawled along the wall, some in the same dripping inks as the outer halls, some hastily scratched into the layers of explosive residue. 

At a workbench directly in front of them, a tall figure was hunched over, lit in flashes of white and blue as they welded two pieces of metal together. A pale garment was tied around their hips. Ghost could just make out thin white markings creeping up the glossy black of their torso.

“Of course she loves me,” the figure muttered between the shrieking of metal, just loud enough for Ghost to hear. “If she didn’t love me she might have avoided this whole mess. And then where would she be? Alive, at least.” 

The figure straightened and turned, and Ghost was struck by their resemblance to the shell he had found in the throne room. The prongs on their shell were thicker, with the tallest in the center of the shell and each subsequent prong growing shorter toward the back, but the similarity was undeniable. 

This had to be Regulus, son of the Pale King, brother to the Lost Princess.

“You’re late, Larula,” Regulus said, flipping the welding goggles off his face to reveal Void-black eyes exactly like his sister’s. 

[ ](https://imgur.com/lbZQ2bx)

There it was again—Larula. The Princess had called them that too. But why?

Regulus snorted and strode toward them, avoiding the wreckage with ease. “Because it’s your name, _ Larula _,” he said, and Ghost remembered the mental link they had shared with their sister. Apparently Regulus could do it too.

“You’re late,” he repeated, unexpectedly lifting Ghost up and onto a nearby table. “Don’t shriek at me.” 

It was good that Regulus warned them, because the very next moment a large needle was being plunged directly into their torso and they had to bite back hard on their instinctive desire to demolish the lab with an Abyss Shriek. Still, they flailed, finding to their surprise that Regulus had managed to disarm them without their noticing. Coldness bloomed in their torso for a second, and then the needle was gone.

“Tiny,” Regulus commented, holding their nail between two fingers as he peered at it. “Suitable.” With a flick of his wrist, the nail was embedded in the wall, right in the center of a large bullseye. Ghost stiffened in outrage.

“You would have stabbed me.” Regulus tossed the explanation over his shoulder as he waded back into the wreckage, plucking up vials and beakers as he went. “I wouldn’t have liked that. As I was saying—“ he hefted a roll of mesh-like material and tossed it onto the table beside Ghost with pinpoint precision “—of course it’s my fault. Of course, it’s also not my fault. As always Blossom is right and wrong in a single sentiment. Optimistic. She knew how I’d answer.” He tossed a bag of something beside the mesh. It landed with a wet splat. “And you’re confused. But you’re always confused. You don’t remember, and you never would.” 

Regulus waded back to them, and Ghost was _ very _tempted to launch a spell at him. Their torso was starting to feel warm and tingly where Regulus had stabbed them, and every word out of his mouth was strange and basically incomprehensible. If he would just talk sensibly!

Regulus patted the space between their horns, pleased by their restraint. “Good, good, you don’t often do that,” he said. “Now hold still and maybe I’ll give you some answers.”

Maybe he’d like to start with where exactly they were, Ghost groused inside their skull.

Regulus huffed as he deftly wrapped the mesh around Ghost’s shell, doing Wyrm knew what with it. “Haven’t you guessed? You sometimes do. We’re in the White Palace.”

The Palace was...in a dream?

“A mind,” Regulus corrected. “Father’s mind, specifically. He pulled a Mother to make it happen, but—“ the netting was pulled tight around their horns “—it happened. And here I am, safe and sound in a prison of necessity.” He slathered something tingly over the netting, his voice dripping with bitterness. “Necessity made by inevitability. Or is it the other way around? Thousands of years of pondering and I’ve yet to make a dent in it.”

What?

“You didn’t inherit Father’s gift,” he said, as if that explained it. Suddenly there was a blade dancing around their face, but Regulus avoided their flailing with preternatural perfection as he cut away at...whatever it was he had done to their shell. 

“Predictable,” he tsk’d. “Now hold still, I’m helping.”

Helping how? Ghost thought they’d be a lot more cooperative if Regulus would just _ tell them _ what was going on!

“No you wouldn't,” the crazy Prince laughed, shoving a vial of black and white goo into their eye with absolutely no warning. “You would have tried to fight me, and then I might have been tempted to put that unusual immortality of yours to the test.” He paused, utterly unbothered by Ghost’s attempts to pry the vial—and by extension, his hand—out of their eye. “And then Blossom would have killed me before all this mess started. Hm. Maybe I should have explained.”

He pulled the empty vial out. Ghost had a split second of relief before another, larger vial replaced it, this time depositing bright blue _ something _ in their carapace.

“I’m helping you,” Regulus repeated impatiently as Ghost beat their tiny fists ineffectually against his hands. “It doesn’t even hurt, you big baby, and I would know. I’m my own test subject.”

Oh, was that why he was so crazy?

Regulus sharply flicked the side of their shell. “Rude,” he huffed.

When the vial was pulled out, Ghost made a flailing attempt to roll off the table and away from their psychotic brother. Regulus promptly caught them and hung them up by their horns. They kicked with all their might, but couldn’t move an inch.

A tiny white bodysuit was produced from the depths of Regulus’s folded-down robes. “Hold still,” he scolded again when they sullenly tried to kick his hands away. The bodysuit was pulled on despite their resistance.

The crazy Prince stepped back and tapped a black claw against the side of his shell. The quiet clicking sound echoed oddly off the ceiling. “What am I forgetting?” He flinched in pain. “Ah, right,” he said, plunging his entire hand into one of his eyes and pulling out a little black orb identical to the one that the Princess had been guarding. “Here. Take this to our birthplace. You’re stronger now, but you’re not invincible, so watch that third jump. Don’t trust pretty lights. Now, off you go.”

The void orb was summarily thrust into Ghost’s eye. Immediately they woke on the palace grounds, flailing in the dirt. Bewildered, they sat up and looked down at themselves. Whatever Regulus had done hadn’t translated into the waking world, because their carapace was still void-dark. Gingerly, they drew the void ball from their shell. It dissolved in their palm, revealing the matching half of the Queensoul—the Kingsoul, they knew, since this half lacked the delicate, glossy blue eye of their mother.

With a tired shake of their head, they got to their feet. Time to re-visit the Void, then. The mystery of their crazy older brother could wait.


	3. Oh Rapture

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Work complete, Regulus finally releases his grip on the White Palace

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning: this chapter contains somewhat suicidal themes

And then Larula was gone, strengthened and prepared for the final battle. Regulus staggered back a step, the knife in his hand falling to the floor with a dozen fractured clangs. The future condensed, a billion stars collapsing into a single black hole. Millions upon millions of paths vanished, leaving a scant few thousand. He swayed, leaning his hand against the table. He didn’t miss and fall into an ungainly heap on the floor.

“It’s done,” he whispered. Larula wouldn’t be coming back. He raised his head and the mental construct that was the White Palace shivered down to its foundations. “Do you hear that, Father,” he asked. “It’s done. I…I can rest now.” Relief washed over him in a drowning wave. His legs gave out. He sank to the floor.

His hands fragmented in his vision. Should he continue on? He flinched, flashing down a dozen paths where he did just that. No, he thought desperately. Peaceful darkness beckoned, and he’d be damned if anyone took his reward from him.

“It’s done,” he said again, rising to his feet. In a trance, he untied the sleeves of his robe from around his waist and kicked the garment off. After a second’s thought, he picked it up, fished a hanger out of the junk pile, and neatly hung it up beside his scorched desk. It was what Blossom would have asked him to do.

He left his father’s workshop behind, punting the helmet doorstop away so that the door swung shut for the first time in millennia. He walked past innumerable failed experiments, marveling at their sheer numbers, until he finally came to the throne room. His father’s shell was still there.

[ ](https://imgur.com/imqXvH9)

He sank down in front of the throne, curling inward and resting the side of his shell on the seat. The edge of his horns tapped against his father’s. “It’s done,” he repeated, and for the first time since he’d last seen Blossom, he wept. One by one, he loosened his ties on the Palace his father had constructed to protect him. He could feel each piece dissolve into nothing—the courtyard, the atrium, the residential wings, the laboratories. Each part, freed, until finally the only thing left was the throne room. The impressions would remain, of course, in just the same way that his father’s corpse had remained. If Larula ever thought to return, they would find only hollow representations. If they ever came to the throne room, they would find only two corpses. He prayed that they would simply forget about him.

Regulus gave one last, shuddering sob. “I’m coming, everyone,” he whispered, loosening the final bond that held him to life. Soon he would be with his mother, with his sister Blossom, maybe even with his father. And it would all be over. No more decisions, no more futures, no more drowning in his own head. Just…silence. With an exhausted sigh, he released his hold and let the throne room fade away.

Finally, Regulus had peace.

[ ](https://imgur.com/Agypd99)

He remembered her laugh, despite the long years since he had last had the privilege to hear it. It was sweet and clear, like the ringing of a silver bell. Blossom always managed to laugh with such compassion and warmth. And now here he was, bathed in darkness, and she was laughing again. He sat up, one hand braced against the floor. The world didn’t fracture around him, and he blinked in astonishment.

“Blossom?” he blurt out, hoping beyond hope that it hadn’t been his imagination.

And then she was there, radiating a gentle, pale light. She moved as if she weighed nothing at all, seeming to float toward him with incredible grace. Her eyes glimmered, pale blue instead of void black, and without even a hint of blighted orange.

“Regulus,” she said, laughing again, and his tears spilled over at the sound. “Brother dearest, I have been waiting for you!”

She held out her hands. He put his in hers without hesitation. “I missed you,” he whispered, choking. “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head and pulled him to his feet. “Don’t be,” she said simply, bending to touch the crown of her head to his. “Now come on, they’re waiting for us!” 


End file.
